With My Father

Ben and baby Ollie visit Papa's Rock.

My father and I spent the first night of my last visit in the emergency room. His pain had pulled us both from the soft comfort of sleep. A clot in his catheter again. I followed the ambulance from his home to the hospital, where I sat at the foot of his bed. I winced with him as a doctor drew the catheter and the thumb-sized glob of blood within it from his penis. I considered his shrunken body as he dozed. I struggled to follow his thoughts and answer his questions each time he opened his eyes: How did you feel when I started seeing Pat, after your mother died? … Second chance at a better husband … You remember what I’ve told you? … I won’t live without dignity ... I won’t be a burden … We’ll move someplace where they let you die and I’ll stop eating … When the time comes … 

My distress showed. “Don’t worry,” he said, rising for a moment from his pillow. “I’m not going to blow my brains out in the garage or anything.”

My parents raised us in a Massachusetts suburb, a green-grass place in years of plenty, but my father’s native habitat was the rock and tumble of the woods. He grew up during the Depression in the small-town city of Keene, New Hampshire, and remembered the hard times fondly. How he and his little brother brawled at recess over the right to ride their one shared bicycle home from school. How dinner one night each week consisted of Graham crackers and milk. How his own father lost his job in the chair factory because no one needed chairs as they needed bread; how his father took to the woods to hunt and fish and, with the game he killed, the garden he tended and the pine birdhouses he fashioned for sale by the side of the road, provided for his family until the war came and the work returned.

So it was that my father followed his father into the woods, and came to love it. You can see that love in their faces, my grandfather and his teenage sons, as they posed for pictures in their yard: as lean as the years from which they emerged, standing with fishing poles as they displayed a string of glistening trout, kneeling with shotguns across their laps and the feathery remains of partridge and pheasants at their feet. This may seem incongruous, finding love in causing death, but it wasn’t, not to them. There was nothing boastful in their stances; these were not big game hunters on safari. There was only joy, the pleasure they took from togetherness in the eternal pursuit of something fundamental: food culled from nature’s bounty. Every living thing dies, plants as well as animals, and few control the time and circumstance of their passing. Without death, there can be no life. We come and go, all living things. One way or another, we all play our part.

So it was that I followed my father into the woods, and came to love it. As the oldest, I thrilled at the privilege of being the first invited to join the hunt. It was fall. Bird season. I was in grade school, not yet ten. My father woke me gently, leaning over my bed, a shadow that whispered “Mark!” until I managed an answer. Downstairs my mother handed us a big bagged lunch and a thermos filled with hot coffee. We were in the car long before my brothers and sister stirred, and in the woods together by the time they stumbled downstairs for cartoons and Cap’n Crunch.

My father bird-hunted with work friends, crew-cut engineers like him who celebrated my presence as they stepped from their cars and loaded their shotguns, my hair cut short like theirs and my head not much above their waists. I followed my father as they deployed across a stretch of bramble, feeling the peril of the day, tripping on roots and dodging the branches that sprung back like lashes as he stepped through the brush. He was in his mid-thirties, beginning to widen in the face and thicken in the middle, but he moved with an athlete’s confidence. He filled my view. I understood without knowing why that he was their leader. As much as the reds and yellows of fall in the woods, I remember its smell, at once crisp and musty, and his: Old Spice, slapped on his face after shaving. On and on we walked. I grew drowsy, drifting to thoughts of the cartoons I was missing. 

Then—

The hunting dog stiffened at a scent only it could capture, its front paw up, tail out straight. “Point!” cried the first to notice. One step, another, purposeful now. Thrum of wings rattling branches a blur rising ba-bam! snick-click! shell flung from chamber another seated ba-bam! bird tumbling from sky. “Fetch!” Off the dog raced, eager to return with told-you-so evidence of its success. I picked up the spent shells, sniffed the burnt powder, put them in my jacket pocket. My father took the bird from the dog’s mouth, limp with new death, pulled open the bag at my hip and placed it inside. Warm against my leg. I didn’t mind. That afternoon, many hours and birds later, back at one of their homes, the men popped their Budweisers and relived the day as they beheaded their kill and gutted it, then pulled the flight feathers and the tiny pinfeathers beneath. I sat on the living room floor and watched football on TV until I was summoned to pull pinfeathers too. Next morning, I took a pair of bird feet to school for show and tell. They were still pliable, and the class rewarded me with “eeeww.” That night, as we ate our harvest, my father cautioned us: Chew slowly, or you’ll crack a tooth on birdshot. 

A year or two later my father judged me ready to follow him deer hunting. We woke even earlier, took an even bigger lunch, dressed for deeper cold. I don’t remember even glimpsing a deer. But moving together through the still whiteness, mindful, alone, he and I, that I remember. I also remember the chipmunk that vanished in alarm as we approached its stone wall, its home, to eat our lunch. My father brushed the snow from the stones, and as we sat he instructed me to place a crust from my sandwich near my side. “Be still,” he said. Soon enough the chipmunk’s nose emerged, quivering, then its head and its front paws, clasped in prayer. We watched each other closely, the rodent and I, until the chipmunk, still quivering, took its chance. It leapt for the crust, squeaked with alarm at its own boldness, spun and disappeared again into the loose stones of the wall. “You see?” my father said. “You wait, and the woods come to you.”

Things changed as I came of age, not because I stopped loving the woods or my father, but because that’s what happens. When I turned thirteen, he bought me a .22, an entry-level rifle. I put it in the back corner of my closet and left it there. Making the eighth-grade basketball team, that was essential; riding the team bus with cheerleaders, even more so. Hunting with my father was not, not with hamburger wrapped in plastic inside the fridge and my mother’s whoopie pies in Tupperware on top of it. I grew into larger awareness in the late Sixties, a time even more fractious and uncertain than today. Leaders fell to assassins’ bullets. Cities burned with frustration over justice denied. Colleges seethed with protest, became their own battlegrounds. Not a time of following one’s father anywhere. Mine had volunteered for the Navy during the Korean War and held his service proudly. I let my hair grow long. The last American troops left Vietnam as I entered high school, and it was Watergate, not war, that divided my father and me over dinners cut short with tension. The culture changed around and within us. We no longer knew how to talk safely with each other. One weekend I brought my girlfriend home from college. My father watched with coffee in hand as I flipped pancakes for her breakfast. “You’re going to make someone a good wife,” he said. A joke? I didn’t take it that way.

The day after that long night in the emergency room, my father was better, but not enough to go home. My wife and I spent our visit in his hospital room, sometimes alone with him, sometimes with Pat, sometimes away so they had time together too. He struggled to rise from bed, no longer the robust figure of his memory or mine, but he seemed himself on the inside. Out of habit, he attempted to charm the latest nurse with each shift change, and generally succeeded. He greeted the volunteers who stopped by in their blue vests like old friends, and sometimes they were; he had volunteered in the hospital too. The front desk security guards asked after him as we came and went. “How is Frank today?” they said. For the most part we talked around where he was and what might come of it. It was easier for us to tell him of life in our empty nest and the latest on our children: our son, an engineer like my father, making his own home in Massachusetts; our daughter, away at college in Pittsburgh and striving toward medical school. From the day they were born, he had been the best of grandfathers, present for every life landmark, bestowing hugs of pride long and large enough to swallow them alive even after games when they barely got off the bench. Every year, all the way through college, he gave them each a stuffed animal for Christmas: a raccoon, a turtle, a squirrel, a wolf. They dwell on our shelves and our pillows still.

Creatures of the woods.

As I approached thirty and before we had children, my wife and I made our own way to the woods in a small, rural town in central New Hampshire where we built our first home. Having little money, we did much of the work ourselves. Again and again, my father drove the hour from his home to help. My wife stained and sealed the kitchen cabinets; my father and I hung them, one by one. When I trimmed the counter to fit with my circular saw, a difficult cut, he sang my praises. He stood on the basement stairs, on the far side of the first door we mounted, and stepped back to consider its alignment just as I leaned forward, unseeing, from above. He caught the door as it fell toward him, and we joined in laughter at our folly. I wore my tool belt loose on my hips as he wore his, and I felt his equal. You have a beautiful place, he said of our house in the woods. As my son grew into his preschool years of innocence, the three of us conducted an expedition to the vernal pool just behind our home. On the way back, my father stopped beneath the trees. He bent to the ground. My son squatted at his side. That’s porcupine scat! my father said, pointing dramatically to a heap of gray-brown pellets in the pine needles. Eyes wide, my son followed his gaze into the branches to search out the pooper hiding somewhere above.

He seemed to age easily, my father, even as his hairline retreated in a fashion now familiar to me. His face grew fuller, his beard grayed, but with his no-one-a-stranger way with the world, he pulsed with vitality. Of course he continued to hunt and fish. With time he settled into annual escapes with his closest friends: to Shin Pond in too-far-to-drive Maine every May for salmon, to Mount Chocorua in can’t-get-there-from-here New Hampshire every November for deer. I joined once in each of these rituals. Together in his aluminum boat we trolled the shimmering gray-blue surface of Shin Pond. He and his friends had a name for every cabin: You Fellas Want A Beer Camp, Kwitcherbitchen Lodge. It turned out all I required to clean the fish I caught was a sharp knife and a couple inches of Wild Turkey in my glass. Hunting as an adult, I carried a deer rifle too, though I had no intention of using it. My father and I picked our way through the woods like synchronized dancers, ever watchful, muzzles up for safety. We kept twenty yards distance, moved without speaking, and yet it seemed we could not be closer. Back in the cabin at each day’s end, I ate too much meat for dinner, avoided arguments with his friends over politics and did my best with cribbage. One night these aging compatriots reached back for their frat days and watched dirty movies, an experience far too awkward for me to discuss.   

I was surprised when my father and Pat moved to Florida, but he was eighty after all and the winters had become too much. He stored his rifle, boots and hunter orange jacket at our house, waiting for his annual return to the woods. When that glad day came, I’d take him to buy a bottle of whiskey and his share of the week’s meat. He’d pronounce my wife’s split pea soup and oatmeal bread the best he’d ever had and we’d send him on his way the next morning. I was in my office the year he called from the middle of the woods in the middle of the week. Something’s wrong with my heart, he said; Arnie knows where I am, he’s coming for me. By the time I sped across the state and got to the hospital he was sitting in bed, sheepish. His doctor had called the night before to report traces of cancer in his urine again. He said nothing to his friends, had a little too much to drink. He hadn’t suffered a heart attack. He was dehydrated. I thought that would end his hunting days, but the next year he came back to the woods again.

His cancer persisted too.

I called my father in Florida every Wednesday evening as I drove the hour home from work. He and Pat occupied a house in a gated community that wrapped itself around a manicured golf course of unlikely green. Landscapers mowed their lawn, trimmed their bushes, sprayed each week for bugs. Even here he found his woods. He delighted in the elegant wading birds that populated the drainage pond beyond their screened lanai, marveled at the occasional alligator that bathed in the heat until the crew arrived to take it away. Every morning, before the sun reached a discouraging height, he rode for miles around the community on his bike. Every week on our call he recounted the creatures he had spied as he pedaled past the last few wild patches of pine, palmetto and beautyberry yet to be developed. Great blue heron today sandhill crane big fat armadillo! The doctors never did pinpoint the source of his cancer. It nibbled away at his plumbing: bit of bladder, little bit more, ureter, kidney. In time the nibbles added up, and each surgical fix seemed to yield failure in another pipe. I’m constipated again, he’d tell me, not really hungry, still losing weight. But I couldn’t see the state of things for myself, not over the phone. In my mind he remained the father I had always known. He still filled my view.

The day after the first night in the emergency room, I emailed my siblings. He’s not dying but he’s much diminished, I wrote. If you can visit soon, do; he needs our encouragement. On the last afternoon of our visit, my wife and I returned to the hospital to say goodbye for now. My father would go home the next day, a Friday. They had an appointment for Monday to discuss the two options their doctor presented: dialysis or self-catheterization, both for the rest of his days. My father’s eyes met mine: I won’t live without dignity, I won’t be a burden. He shrugged, as if resigned to both now. “We’ll see,” he said of his choices. When I leaned in for his hug, he pulled me close and kissed my cheek.

The thing about fishing is you can’t really do it without catching fish. Drag a lure in the water, and if the conditions are right, the fish are going to strike. But it’s easy to hunt without hunting, if you never pull the trigger. Somewhere across the years, my father had come to love his time in the woods more than stalking the creatures he found there. It had been decades since he fired a gun, with intention, at a living thing. 

My wife and I were eating breakfast at the airport on Saturday morning when Pat called. She choked out the words: Your father shot himself, in the head, in the garage, he’s gone. I choked the same words to my wife just as the waitress arrived with our eggs. We’re on our way back, I said. No, Pat told me; go home and be there for your family, your children, your brothers and sister. We flew to New Hampshire, my wife’s hand in mine, tears sliding in silence as I shook my head no to the beverage cart, nothing to drink thanks. You worry about your children, even when grown, until you can hold them. How could he do that to us?!? He promised he wouldn’t!

In the days to come, with each halting call, I learned more. “We’ve had a good run, haven’t we?” he said to Pat that morning as he encouraged her out the door to swim her laps in the community pool. She returned to find him in his biking clothes, in the garage, dead by his own hand. 

Months later, at his memorial service, I asked his oldest hunting friend to tell the first story. We all sat in a circle, sang the Navy hymn, shared memories. After it ended, the hunters lingered to pass a flask in his honor. My father’s last wishes, prepared long before, contained simple instructions: Spread my ashes in places that will make my spirit soar. Knowing where came easily to all of us. My son took a jar of ashes to Pearl Harbor on his honeymoon, pouring them in the calm water near the battleship on which his grandfather served. My brother’s family in Kansas planted a maple tree in a park, put a plaque at its base, scattered his ashes on the roots. My sister, an ocean-going scientist, in the Atlantic. Our cousins in Maine, in Shin Pond.

I walked the hill behind our house until I found the boulder with the best view down through the trees, near enough for me to pay a visit now and then. Papa’s Rock, I called it. The hunters delivered him to the woods below Chocorua where they had roamed.

I can never know when my father decided to take his life. Why he chose to end it in the garage, burdening Pat as he did, I could not understand. Not until the answer came to me, in a quiet moment, as if he had returned to explain it himself. My father went to the garage to take one last ride on his bike, to a wild patch, to the woods. He meant to hide his bike where it would not soon be found, walk in among the trees and the brush and the creatures one last time. He meant to die in a spot that touched him as only the woods could, to die in his way, in his time, in a place that said come home. The reality of his plight arrested him in the garage. He was too weak to accomplish the last thing he asked of life.

I don’t presume to speak for others who loved my father every bit as deeply as I did, who have their own experiences to cherish and lament. There are many ways to know him. But I don’t believe the tragedy is how he died. The tragedy is where.